Temporally Louder/Instable Tinnitus — Anyone?

Hey everyone,

I’m a 30-year-old guy from Sweden and I’ve had tinnitus since I was 17. It was caused by my moped at the time which had a broken tailpipe and was very loud. One day when I stepped off it I had a hissing/ringing high pitched sound in my head (or equal in both ears, I'd say around 10-13 kHz). I habituated fairly quickly to the sound and have lived without much irritation from it ever since, even though I can hear it pretty much in any environment, I can usually ignore it easily. Even when I had a period of severe anxiety problems in my early twenties the tinnitus didn’t seem to affect, or be affected by this, which makes me pretty sure that it is solely caused by the exposure to loud noise that I had. Some other details about it is that it increases momentarily if I bite down my teeth hard, or if I move my jaw in an extreme manner. Also, a thing that I think separate me from many other tinnitus sufferers is that I find it easiest to deal with when I’m somewhere quite. It’s if my brain thinks it’s more difficult to deal with the tinnitus sound simultaneously as dealing with other sound input from outside my head. This is especially true when I have my loud periods. Because of this, sleeping has never been a problem for me.

I have regularly been going to concerts and night clubs without almost never having any problems, sometimes using earplugs when it’s been very loud, but most of the time without. Sometimes (maybe 5-10 times per year) my tinnitus (smilingly randomly but sometimes after loud noise exposure) enters what I call an ”unstable state”. This usually lasts for a few hours up to 2 days, but then goes away and the tinnitus settles where it was beforehand.

A while ago I had an accident with my stereo receiver. I won’t go into the technical details of it, but the short story is that all of a sudden the volume turned to max while I was sitting in front of the speakers, facing them. I don’t know how loud it was in dBs, but it was loud to the point that my heart started pumping rapidly as I quickly turned the volume dial down again. My ears didn’t hurt at first and my tinnitus seemed unaffected. After about two days however i entered a pretty severe unstable state. Now, after two weeks, it still hasn’t settled even though it’s gradually become a little bit better, in a two step forward, one step back kind-of-way.

Now I’m a little scared, since I’ve never experienced an unstable state this long before, that it won’t go away. I want to ask if anyone else here has a similar kind of tinnitus to mine, recognize this unstable state that I’m talking about, and how long it’s been going on for you at longest?

I’ve made an image below to show more precise how I experience my tinnitus in what I call the unstable state.



The orange line is my ”baseline”. This is the tinnitus I have that is always there and that I have properly habituated to. When I enter the ”unstable state” I start having distinguished hissings on top of my baseline. These are almost the same frequency but a little bit louder and are only small ”shots” of hissings firing for 1-2 seconds. This is as you can imagine very annoying and way harder to habituate to then the fixed, stable sound of the baseline. For some reason these shots of sound never fire in both ears at the same time but is either just in one ear or flickers back and forth between left and right. This is contrary to the baseline which is always centered ”inside” my head.

 

Shit shit, it's not getting better... the baseline seems to be getting sharper in its character and the "firings" even more frantic. And worst of all, yesterday I noticed a faint 400 Hz-ish tone in my right ear. It's very low, but it was still there this morning and still is, making me even more stressed out. Dunno why I'm writing this here... just need some hope and understanding I guess.

Getting a professional back and neck massage tomorrow. Hopefully it will help to ease this horrible spike.

 

Hej @Philip83, I know that this is an old thread, but I was wondering if the "shots" eventually subsided?

I am having similar symptoms even though I have not been exposed to any loud noise; it began randomly after a walk in the park.

I even feel bad to post here with my relatively minor issues, but I was doing relatively well since few days ago. I think I never posted in this section; my tinnitus began almost 4 months ago after I stupidly repeated several times the action of falling asleep with headphones playing white noise. I had the classical high pitch in both ears + a very oscillatory electric buzz in my left ear. I usually score between 30 and 38 at the THI - my tinnitus is probably moderat-ish (covered by most sounds, can be heard outside/in a shopping mall/on the train as background noise).

Two weeks ago I went out for a long walk in the park and when I came back I started hearing some low chirp in my right ear. Few days after the left ear began to misbehave as well; at the moment the chirp is almost inaudible but in my left ear I can hear loud bursts of tinnitus that last 0.5-1 seconds. They come in groups of 5-10 and then stop for few minutes. The strange thing is that since when these bursts started, my usual baseline seems to be quieter - usually in the afternoon I need to mask it (my tinnitus is of the type that ramps up in the late afternoon), but now I am sitting in my office with some 35 dB and the tinnitus seems only a gas leak. Also, the bursts seem to stop for a little while if I take magnesium. Also, I do not think I had the bursts last week when I was with my girlfriend - when I am with her I am usually so calm that the tinnitus is a nonissue.

I am wondering if anxiety might be the culprit here. I exclude loud noises - I live in a 30 dB studio flat far from noises, I literally leave only to buy food and to take the train. I also do not take any medications or have other symptoms (other than a cold).

I could use some word of hope. Anybody else experienced this type of bursts?